Monday, February 18, 2019

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Dion Rabouin examines the U.S.' unprecedented level of inequality and wealth concentration. And Orsetta Causa, Anna Vindics and James Browne highlight how worsening inequality around the globe has been the result of avoidable policy choices.

- But David Dayen writes that Amazon's failed attempt to extract billions of dollars as the price of setting up a headquarters in New York represents needed pushback against corporate handouts. And Jamie Merchant is optimistic that communities elsewhere will follow the precedent:

The absurdities of the Amazon deal, which enraged New Yorkers and
motivated them to fight back, are globalized absurdities present in
every factory, every office, every farm, and every
export-processing-zone across the planet in which people are treated
like cattle, offered by their governments to Amazon and other
world-striding corporations as a cheap resource to be exploited. This
outward looking, supranational view is already implicit in New York’s
anti-Amazon movement, which, much to the company’s displeasure,
broadened its perspective to encompass Amazon’s general
attitude toward unionization, corporate welfare, and immigration policy.
In other words, the movement’s was a holistic critique: rejecting
Amazon’s values for a wholly different idea of the kind of world we
want.

Labor rights, tax justice, and the free movement of people are
issues that go far beyond not just Queens, but also beyond U.S. national
borders, potentially linking together communities who are struggling
for the same goals in similar conditions across the world. By tying the
local fight against Amazon to bigger structural problems, the Queens
activists opened a window onto a transnational, anti-corporate politics
in which laborers everywhere recognize their shared stake in a common
fight against the corporate domination and crushing inequality of the
present order.

- Susan weighs in on Jason Kenney's attack on people of "modest human capital" and the standard of living they can apparently expect - while noting the irony that Kenney himself is lacking in what his party claims should justify a higher minimum wage.

- Finally, Megan Mayhew Bergman questions why so much money is being spent purchasing and developing property which will be underwater if climate change continues on its present course. Will Bunch comments on the folly of pouring public resources into fracking which destabilizes land while polluting our planet. Christof Ruhl writes that the reduced use of plastic only adds to the foreseeable economic trends which are making oil development generally into a sucker's bet. And John Funk notes that even conservative voters in the U.S. strongly support investing in renewable energy rather than fossil fuels.